SHORT REPORT: A LONG WAY GONE

"I jumped over the gutter, sat against a tree, and, throughout the night, thought about my uncle and then my father, mother, brother, friends. Why does everyone keep dying except me? I walked up and down the road trying not to be angry."
—page 211, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.

A sick child that needs plenty of downtime and rest allows me to finish a book within 36 hours of beginning. Considering sleep, preparation of meals, and care of the child—along with the fact that I am a fairly slow reader, by choice—I raced through A Long Way Gone. The book was harrowing and horrible to read. It is filled with tales of wholesale slaughter, starvation, warfare, drug addiction, rape, violence. The author and narrator of the book, Ishmael Beah, is caught in the crossfire of civil war in his country of Sierra Leone. He is forced to become a soldier in the Sierra Leone army at the age of thirteen due to circumstances that leave him no other choice, except for that of death.

He writes of the destruction of his village. He writes of his wanderings through the countryside of rural southwest Sierra Leone. He writes of his unwilling conscription. He writes of his easy adaptation to a life of killing. He writes of the use of methamphetamine, cocaine, and brown brown—a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder—that makes him feel little pain, and rather immortal, in the midst of combat. He writes of his eventual "release" and rehabilitation.

He is given opportunities that allow him to survive where others around him do not. Chance? Luck? Destiny? The guidance of the hand of God? If the latter, then how can he explain the untimely deaths of many around him?

This book tackles many of the same topics raised in What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers. I don't know how many of these stories the world needs to hear before it acts to end the wars that create these stories. When will the fighting end in Sierra Leone and Sudan and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Colombia and Iraq? When will nations of the world say no more to arms dealing and smuggling? How many more men and women and children need to die?